Green-Wood Is the Brooklyn Cemetery With a Velvet Rope

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Established in 1838, Green-Wood was named a national historic landmark nine years ago. During the 19th century, the city’s wealthy and prominent considered virtually no other final real estate acquisition.CreditCreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

On a warm evening in mid-September, 260 people filed through the Gothic Revival gates of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for a gala, the purpose of which was to raise money for the upkeep and preservation of the compound’s storied grounds. A benefit for a cemetery, held in a cemetery, isn’t for everyone, which is to say that it probably isn’t for 21-year-old daughters of foreign billionaires living in $16 million starter apartments and intermittently taking classes at Parsons.

Cocktail hour was held around a koi pond, in an area bordered by the entombed remains of the cremated or, to borrow the argot of the funerary business, their “cremains.” Manny Howard, a writer who once chronicled his efforts to subsist only on what he raised in his Ditmas Park backyard in a book, “My Empire of Dirt,” stood near his father, who was in a sense there, and yet not there, or, in any case, in no position to order a glass of Chablis.

In its eighth year now, the Green-Wood gala belies the idea that wealthy Anglo-Saxons of the old guard can be counted among the city’s many vanished civilizations. The crowd gathered in September drew from the quiet society that still dominates the culture of Brooklyn Heights, where nothing is more anathema than what is trendy, and from what still stands of the patrician club life on the North Shore of Long Island. One of the honorees that evening was a businessman and 13th-generation Brooklynite, Malcolm MacKay, author of a book called “Impeccable Connections,” a graduate of Princeton’s class of 1963 and a man who seemed capable of emerging from neurosurgery to deliver an unsurpassable toast to his doubles partner.

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A view of the Manhattan skyline.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

As benefits go this one was a relative success, raising more money than any of the others to date. The party netted $80,000, but this followed a gift of $1 million, the largest individual donation the cemetery has received, from a Manhattan couple, for the restoration of a greenhouse that will be converted to a visitor center. Beyond that, though, Green-Wood is, once again, becoming a place of aspirational burial, especially for Brooklyn’s rising haute bohemian class, a status it had failed to maintain for many decades.

In New York, the quest for social distinction spans the life cycle without interruption, beginning in utero when an ambitious fetus will signal to her mother to “please deliver me with a C-section at Lenox Hill,” and ending with interment at the right address, in the best company. Established in 1838, Green-Wood was named a national historic landmark nine years ago. During the 19th century, the city’s wealthy and prominent considered virtually no other final real estate acquisition.

“It is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon Fifth Avenue,” The New York Times wrote in 1866, “to take his airings in the Park and to sleep with his fathers in Green-wood.” From 1869 to 1887 alone, the composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher and Boss Tweed were all enshrined within the cemetery’s more than 400 acres.

New money ruined everything. By the early 20th century, Gilded Age arrivistes were decamping to Woodlawn in the Bronx, which had been built in 1863, 25 years after Green-Wood, making it in some sense seem passé. At Green-Wood, as the writer and former banker Michael M. Thomas put it, “no one is jumping out of the grave to tell you how much money they have.” His maternal ancestors since the 1840s have been buried there, and eventually he will lie there with them.

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The grave of Jean-Michel Basquiat.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

Along with the Pulitzers and the Macys and the Woolworths who flocked to Woodlawn came artists and writers, leading the two cemeteries to what Green-Wood’s development director, Lisa Alpert, referred to as a “Harvard-Yale” rivalry. I sat with her recently in the vast, bright, professorial-looking office of Richard Moylan, Green-Wood’s president, adjacent to the facility’s crematory. “I’ve had to cede all the jazz musicians to Woodlawn,” Mr. Moylan said with an authentic sense of lament. A lover of classic rock, he wears cuff links in the shape of tiny guitars; many of his friends growing up were musicians, and he had planned to leave Green-Wood, where he began working as a grass cutter in 1972, only in order to manage one of their careers, had any of them become famous.

Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins were all buried at Woodlawn during the second half of the last century. When Max Roach went to Woodlawn in 2007, Mr. Moylan said, “it killed me.” Mr. Moylan also regrets having failed to secure the lyricist Adolph Green, who died in 2002.

Eleven years later, things were being rectified; when the jazz pianist and composer Cedar Walton, who had lived in Brooklyn, died in 2013, he was buried at Green-Wood, in what can be regarded in the cemetery profession as a coup.

Not long before that, the novelists Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, a married couple, bought Lot 45364 in Section 69 of the cemetery. “Because Brooklyn is so important to me, when I thought about where I wanted to be buried, I thought it had to be Brooklyn,” Mr. Auster told me recently. “I want my body to be in the earth eventually. I’m going to get the cheapest pine box so it falls apart quickly.”

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The grave of Leonard Bernstein.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

He began to learn about the cemetery when he was researching his 2010 novel, “Sunset Park,” in which a character writing her dissertation positions her desk to look out the window toward “the quiet of Green-Wood’s vast, rolling ground, where more than a half a million bodies are buried, which is roughly the same number as Milwaukee ...”

Green-Wood has essentially become one of the many beneficiaries of Brooklyn’s renaissance, of its standing as the country’s liveliest marketplace for cultural capital. A few years ago the artist Nancy Spero was buried there alongside her husband, Leon Golub. The celebrity chef Michael Lomonaco has bought a plot. Serving as the master of ceremonies at this year’s benefit, the author and public-radio host Kurt Andersen told the audience that he and his wife, Anne Kreamer, who for years have lived in nearby Carroll Gardens, planned to spend the afterlife at Green-Wood and encouraged others to buy plots and do the same. Space was running out; it was best to purchase now. And, one might add, Manhattan burial is a near impossibility.

During Green-Wood’s many fallow years it wasn’t simply that the notables weren’t coming, Mr. Moylan said, but that the cemetery didn’t have a sophisticated marketing and customer service operation to deal with them on the rare occasions when they did. When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988, “he was treated like a nobody here,” Mr. Moylan said, adding, “No one knew who he was.”

Something similar happened with Leonard Bernstein, who was buried at Green-Wood in 1990. “Even with Lenny we were so bad,” Mr. Moylan said, “we told his family they had to follow our rules for monumentation; we gave them a hard time about an ivy border.”

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The grave of Horace Greeley.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

By the time Pete Hamill came shopping at Green-Wood a few years ago, the staff was more adept at accommodating the well-known. On a tour, he said he wanted to be buried near Boss Tweed, among the badly behaved.

Like any good salesman, Mr. Moylan has a client wish list selected from the high caste of creative Brooklynites; he’d like Paul Giamatti to come, and Spike Lee.

The idea that the pursuit of cachet should last for eternity was deftly satirized in a recent episode of “Odd Mom Out,” the cable-television comedy lampooning Upper East Side life. In it, the family matriarch is desperate to receive admission to an exclusive cemetery whose fussy director intones, “Our grounds hold some of the most legendary members of society — heads of state, Barney of Barneys.”

Jill Kargman, the writer and actress who stars in the show, culled the idea from her own life, fascinated as she was by her parents’ methodical cemetery explorations, conducted, as she put it, “like a boarding school tour.” Ultimately, her father, the former Chanel president Arie Kopleman, and his wife, Coco, selected a graveyard in Massachusetts whose rigorous vetting process ultimately seemed to demand letters of recommendation. “I kept saying, ‘O.K. ocean views, but you know we’re going to be dead,’ ” Ms. Kargman said.

Already, among Brooklyn writers not yet old enough to have reached the recommended age for a first colonoscopy, there is wishful discussion about Green-Wood, where the price list runs to $350,000 for a 756 square-foot mausoleum. As it happens, that is only about a third of the price of a condominium of comparable size in Dumbo. Mr. Moylan might have a new slogan right at his fingertips: “Die. It’s cheaper.”